Jewel Master Collection for Nintendo DS

Jewel Master Collection is a compilation card for the Nintendo DS that puts Jewel Master: Egypt and Jewel Master: Cradle of Athena side by side, released at the end of September 2011. It adds no new campaign of its own, which is the main point of the one detailed review it received.

Overview

Both halves are match-three puzzlers in which collected pieces turn into buildings. The Egyptian game builds farms, settlements and temples along the Nile, and the Greek one carries the idea into mythology. Because they share a skeleton, the compilation is really one game played in two skins, and the WorthPlaying reviewer Brian Dumlao treats it that way.

gamepressure.com, a Polish site, summarises the package as roughly 200 levels, 15 bonus levels with Greek-myth themes, 40 buildings and some new bonus tools and modes. Dumlao does not mention new modes and counts 200 stages in total, so the two descriptions do not line up completely.

How it plays

Dumlao describes a loop that is identical in both games. The player matches three or more symbols to gather resources, first clears tiles that are coloured differently, then guides an object to the bottom of the board before time is up. In Egypt that object is a scarab and in Athena it is an orb. Matches produce three kinds of currency that pay for civilization pieces, and some of those pieces give power-ups that remove obstacles, add time or break locked items.

He records a few quirks. On oddly shaped boards the pieces sometimes spill sideways instead of dropping straight. A level is also counted as finished when the object reaches the bottom of any column, a rule the game never states and one that makes boards much easier once found. Relax mode, despite its name, replays finished levels under the same limits. There is no endless mode, no leaderboard and no multiplayer.

The Athena half adds missions in which locusts, invaders or mythical monsters must be beaten by matching particular objects, and clearing them opens sliding block puzzles. Dumlao found those puzzles hard to read because of low-resolution art.

Release and credits

The compilation came out on 27 September 2011, according to both WorthPlaying and gamepressure.com. WorthPlaying lists Cerasus Media as developer and Storm City Entertainment as publisher, although its review text says Storm City Games. gamepressure.com credits Storm City Games for both roles. No ESRB entry for the compilation turned up, and a marketplace listing that shows E10+ is not an official record. The Athena entry at the ESRB carries E10+ for Suggestive Themes.

Reception

WorthPlaying scored it 6.0 out of 10 on 13 November 2011. Dumlao judged that nothing new is offered and that the appeal rests on two games with many puzzles on one cart. He thought Cradle of Athena was the better half and complained about uneven music volume, gameplay music that sounded more like horror than ancient Greece, and chained pieces that obscure the tiles beneath. His advice was that match-three devotees wanting more puzzles would get their money’s worth, while newcomers should look at better and often cheaper games first.

Can you still play it?

A single DS game card carries both games. It plays on the Nintendo DS, DS Lite and DSi, and on Nintendo 3DS consoles in DS mode. Wii U and Switch cannot read DS cards, and the 3DS eShop closed on 27 March 2023, so no digital copy exists to buy.